What Happened: December 1, 2021

The Big Story

Two potentially revolutionary technologies appear to be on a collision course as advances in quantum computing threaten to undermine the value of cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-based products. Quantum technology took a step forward Tuesday with the launch of Quantinuum, a company formed from the merger of a subsidiary of Honeywell International and the British-based Cambridge Quantum Computing, resulting in “the largest, standalone quantum computing enterprise anywhere,” according to the company. Instead of storing data in bits, which can either be 0s or 1s, as in standard computers, quantum machines use qubits that take advantage of a quantum state called entanglement to store exponentially more data than is currently possible. Quantum computing is still in its infancy but promises to unlock computational powers exponentially greater than what can currently be achieved by the world’s most advanced supercomputer—which is why China and the United States are in a race to develop the technology. The first to achieve “quantum supremacy” gains an enormous strategic advantage. The problem this creates for people invested in Bitcoin is that the value of cryptocurrencies, and other products based on blockchain technology, lies in it being “uncheatable,” which is true for now but may fall apart if quantum machines unleash codebreaking powers beyond anything we can currently envision.

Read it here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/martingiles/2021/11/30/quantinuum-launches-with-over-270-million-to-tackle-quantum-computing-challenges/

Today’s Back Pages: A Modest Proposal to Fix the U.S. Military and Democracy

The Rest

→ After hearing oral arguments on Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared to lean toward supporting a Mississippi law banning abortion starting at 15 weeks of pregnancy. The case before the court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, has profound political implications because it bears directly on earlier rulings in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey that established a national constitutional right to abortion. If the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, it could potentially return abortion law to being a state-by-state issue. A ruling in the case isn’t expected until June 2022 and is guaranteed to set off a firestorm, galvanizing voters of both parties ahead of midterm congressional elections.

→ Alumni organizations are refusing to pony up donations—which account for almost 20% of the student budget at private schools—to universities that are failing to protect free speech on campus. The Wall Street Journal details efforts by 20 alumni groups that have sprung up in recent years. A survey from earlier this year of more than 37,000 students at 159 colleges found that more than 80% said they self-censor at least some of the time on campus, while 66% said it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent him or her from speaking on campus; 23% even backed the use of violence to stop speech.
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/alumni-withhold-donations-demand-colleges-enforce-free-speech-11638280801

→A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on Tuesday narrowly voted to approve an antiviral pill made by Merck for treating COVID-19 infections in high-risk, unvaccinated people. While the company originally said the drug was more than 50% effective at preventing hospitalizations and death, updated data presented to the FDA on Tuesday had the more modest claim of being 30% effective. Questions about the drug’s efficacy, and the lack of studies into potential side effects, led a number of doctors on the panel to vote against approval. The drug’s benefits are “modest at best,” said Dr. Sankar Swaminathan, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah School of Medicine who was one of the “no” votes on the panel. “Given the large potential population affected, the risk of widespread effects on potential birth defects, especially delayed effects on the male, has not been adequately studied,” Swaminathan told CNBC.

→ A 15-year-old boy is in custody and at least four of his classmates are dead after he opened fire inside his school Tuesday in Pontiac, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Another eight students were injured in the shooting, in which the suspect fired 15 to 20 shots with a semiautomatic handgun before he was detained. No motive has yet been identified in what is now the 28th school shooting in the United States this year.

→ Don’t cross Amsterdam’s Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community and expect to be welcomed back just because a few centuries have passed. A philosophy professor recently requested to bring a film crew to the synagogue that was once attended by Baruch Spinoza, the great Enlightenment philosopher who was excommunicated from the Dutch Portuguese Jewish community in 1656 for engaging in what the rabbis at the time deemed “abominable heresies.” In his response to the professor, Rabbi Joseph Serfaty, a leader in the Dutch Sephardic community, wrote, “The chachamim and parnassim of Kahal Kados Torah excommunicated Spinoza and his writings with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time and cannot be rescinded.” The ban, apparently, extends to Spinoza scholars and their film crews, too. Request denied.
Read more: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/amsterdam-synagogue-declares-jewish-expert-on-spinoza-persona-non-grata/

→Remember a few months ago when liberal commentators, such as MSNBC’s Joy Reid, and countless print journalists were insisting that talk about critical race theory being taught in schools was just fear mongering by right-wing fanatics? Someone forgot to tell Detroit school superintendent ​​Dr. Nikolai Vitti, who announced at a school board meeting caught on video last month that his district “is deeply using critical race theory” and is “very intentional about creating a curriculum.”
Read more: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/detroit-superintendent-says-district-was-intentional-about-embedding-crt-into-schools

→The world’s first living robots, called xenobots, created by scientists in a laboratory using frog cells, have been observed reproducing in a way that’s never been seen before in plants or animals. The organic robots used a process called kinematic self-replication that has only been seen before at the molecular level and takes about five days. The initial research that led to the invention of the xenobots, which scientists hope can eventually be programmed to carry out tasks like locating cancer cells in a human body, was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s innovation lab. All of this, I’m afraid to say, seems like an ominous preamble to some future news headline about the moment when we should have known that creating self-replicating organic robots had the potential to go very wrong.

→New York’s Mayor-elect Eric Adams spoke directly to the city’s large Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic community on Sunday, the first night of Chanukah. He appeared at the lighting of the world’s largest menorah and told the crowd, “We know what the Rebbe did for all of us,” referring to the late Lubavitch rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson.

→CNN has suspended Chris Cuomo, the network’s top anchor, for using his media sources to assist in the public relations campaign for his brother, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who faced a string of sexual misconduct allegations before resigning from office.

The Back Pages

backpages A Modest Proposal to Fix the U.S. Military, Intelligence Community, and Democracy

In light of the Pentagon releasing its Global Posture Review this week, a worldwide threat assessment of U.S. forces, I’d like to offer a modest proposal for fixing the military and intelligence communities and shoring up our nation’s security. The White House should enforce an immediate moratorium on new security clearances and a hard limit on the number of documents that can be classified per month. When genuine security needs justify breaking the classification rule, anything that’s made secret over the set limit will require the government to declassify an equal volume of information.

This should be easy since the number of currently classified documents still being kept from the public despite there no longer being any security rationale behind the secrecy is some multiple of all the pages in the library of Alexandria.

I have some personal experience with this particular form of institutional dysfunction from my time serving in Army intelligence, during which I was tasked with the additional duty of being a classification officer. Technically, a classification officer’s job is to determine the level of classification for a particular piece of information: Is it something that can be seen by our local allies in Iraq or Afghanistan? Only by NATO partners? Or perhaps only by fellow Americans with top-secret clearances? The technical criteria matter less than the incentives, which favor classifying everything at a higher level of classification than it merits as a form of CYA (cover your ass). The problem with making too many things secret is that vital information might not get shared with people who need it, which is lamentable, of course, though the damage is difficult to assess. On the other hand, the penalty for giving too low a classification to something that should be at a high level is that it could be your ass. Therefore, default to CYA and just make it all secret.

The industrial-scale production of secrets is what makes it possible to hide from our own failures and deflect their costs. In Afghanistan, the fact that top officials knew the war was being lost was kept a secret. While the public was fed a steady stream of false optimism about how the war was just about to turn the corner, the secret documents, which were eventually forced into the open in The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers,” hid the truth.

At some point after the start of the Cold War and the unprecedented growth of the national security bureaucracies, the United States became a nation run on secrecy. The late great liberal Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that “secrecy had become a form of regulation utilized by the administrative state.” What he meant by that, as I wrote in a past column of the Back Pages, was that “secrecy was no longer just about the government’s habit of hiding inconvenient or embarrassing facts … Rather, the U.S. political system took a turn from keeping secrets to protect the prerogatives of the powerful, to generating secrets as the source of its own power.”

But secrecy as a method of government is incompatible with democracy.